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## Fitzjames and the Last Document
The Victory Point note is the only written document that has survived from the Franklin expedition’s time in the Arctic. Its two entries — the first optimistic, dated May 1847; the second devastated, dated April 1848 — represent the full written record that 129 men left of their experience.
The gap between those two entries spans the most consequential year the expedition experienced. The ships became permanently beset in September 1846. Franklin died in June 1847. The first entry was written eight months after the ships became trapped in ice that had already held them for two winters and from which they would never be freed. The second entry was written ten months after Franklin’s death, as the survivors abandoned the ships and began a march from which none of them would return.
That ten-month gap — June 1847 to April 1848 — is the period for which the historical record is most silent. During those months, the expedition’s command structure reorganized around Crozier as senior officer and Fitzjames as his second. Twenty-four men died during this period, adding to the nine previously dead. The ships, beset for nineteen months, became progressively more difficult to maintain. The supplies that had been calculated for a three-year expedition were depleted by two and a half years of static ice-bound existence rather than active passage through the Northwest Passage.
What decisions were made, what alternatives were considered, what conversations passed between Crozier and Fitzjames and the other surviving officers — none of this is documented. The journals and letters that expedition members would typically have kept throughout a voyage of this kind were either not preserved, not found, or not found in locations and conditions where they were recognizable as such. Some hopes remain attached to the ships’ interiors; the relatively well-preserved state of the Terror in particular has led some researchers to speculate that journals might have been placed in the ship’s storage for preservation before the abandonment.